How Remote Jobs Are Helping Woman Workforce In India

India’s record when it comes women’s participation in the workforce, is second lowest in the Group of 20 (G20) economics, according to a report published by Oxfam (.pdf) in 2014. What’s surprising is India is one of the countries where the rate of participation of women in the workforce has drastically declines in last decade, so much that it fell from 33% in 1991 to 27% in 2012, according to UN gender statistics.

Educated women are also opting out of full-time employment. What gives?

There are certain situations under which it becomes very difficult for a woman to cope up with the long office hours and traveling long distance to the office each day. A woman is also a pioneer of responsibilities to household activities at every home. Moreover, sometimes the period of pregnancy also affects the regular visit to the office for every woman. It won’t be wrong if I state that means of transportation throughout India (weather in metro cities, town or village) is yet to be upgraded as per the safety and security for every woman.

However, the good news is the days have passed when women were not allowed to pursue higher studies or have jobs. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), more number of women of working age are enrolling in secondary school. There’s a general trend that women are becoming more independent, educated and successful in the career path they choose.

Indian women have scaled the height of success which cannot be described in few words. The fact states that among 50 most powerful global businesswomen, 3 of them are Indians (from fortune). World’s top banks consist of Indian Women as there important board members of their organization. Another surprising statics state that the IT sector in India employs over 1 million women which are approximately 32% of the total workforce. The fields in which women are employed in more numbers are typically IT firms, followed by Shipping, Logistics, telecom, broking, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods.

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Do check out this video by Livemint.com with nine facts about women in Indian workforce.

The situation isn’t hunky dory but it’s improving.

A surprising list of popular MNCs (Multi-National Companies) providing remote based jobs are listed below.

Dell
Flexi work option at Dell includes remote work, job sharing, flextime and part-time job. Hence a popular IT solution for computers and printer supports remote jobs across the world.

Aetna
One of the successful healthcare industry sector including pharmacy and dental healthcare with a network of 5,400 hospitals across the world.

Apple
In the field of telecommunication, marketing, operations, human resources and even finance, this giant provides remote job.

And the list continues similarly:-

American Express

Xerox

Humana

ADP

CyberCoders

U.S. Department of Transportation

IBM

Salesforce.com

About.com

Microsoft

You can find the full list of companies that offer remote jobs here. Besides these, there are companies like Buffer.com who offer jobs remote only.

Talking of India specific, an organization called Sheroes.in is a community for jobs and careers for women. It focuses on career options including work-from-home jobs, part-time jobs, corporate opportunities, franchising, resellers, partnerships and startups for women. The company recently raised Rs 5 crore from prominent investors. Currently, more than 6,000 companies use the platform and over half a million women are Sheroes members across 5,000 locations.

One of the investor, Rajan Anandan, Google India’s managing director and one of the country’s most active angel investor said that, “The company (Sheroes) has a clearly articulated opportunity, and has already shown some level of traction. Ten years from now, Sheroes should have impacted the lives of 100 million women. It is globally scalable, and will go beyond India.”

Such companies will definitely help India bridge the gap. Besides that, the government is trying too. As per the new law passed, every company that is listed in the stock exchange must have at least one woman on its board. Apart from that the law is also passed according to which every organization is required to have grievance committee with at least 10 workers which would work against sexual harassment and all complaints to support women workforce. Such steps are in right direction.

Hence with the above facts, statistics, and governmental support, we can observe that women workforce have increased and improved substantially. This has also brought in the successful concept of remote jobs or flextime jobs rather than fixed 9 am to 5 pm job for every individual.

However, ther are several parameters that should be kept into consideration to achieve success in Remote jobs or Flextime jobs are following.

Clear and fixed goals for the employees in Flextime job

It is very important for an organization to maintain clear goals and also a clear path of working to reach those goals. This would also need an effective communication between employee and employer to have successful flextime job.

Employee roles and responsibilities

In every organization every employee from manager to staff are expected to deliver the required contribution towards organization. For this each one of them has some roles and responsibilities. It is very important that every employee has clearly understood his/her exact roles and responsibilities.

Mode of communication and its frequency

Another important thing to be kept into consideration is to decide an appropriate mode of communication between the employee and employer with its appropriate frequency so that pre-defined goals can be achieved with the help of employees. There are a bunch of tools you can use for smooth functioning of your remote job. We will soon post an article listing the tools that we use at Nomadcareers.

Regular working hours

Though it’s a remote job, some regular working hours should be defined and established for the smooth operation of an organization. It can be a 9-5 job but you work from home. Or it can be something like what Buffer follows. The company has weekly report sessions, where employees inform their peers on what they are working and their progress from last week. Besides such weekly report session, everyone is free to work from whatever timing they want. It’s important that you clear it with your employer on the timings and whether it suits you.

Choose the right kind of job for you but don’t give up your career. A job means financial independence. A job means freedom. A job means you have a say in the rules.